G abriel stopped after the first turn of the steps descending from the tower and attempted to calm his pulse. His rod was threatening to rip through silk, and the only thing he could think about was the way Kate’s lips parted in a gasp when she saw him in the flesh.
It hadn’t frightened her. She was the kind of woman whom men dreamed about, the sort who wouldn’t cower under the coverlet waiting to do her marital duty, but a woman with whom one could grow old, always discovering, never tiring, never less than enamored, bewitched, in lust.
He leaned his head back against the stone wall. His heart was thumping in his chest, tempting him to turn around, slam through that door, cover her mouth with his.
But she wasn’t his. She couldn’t be his. The chill truth of it slowly filtered through his blood, like the icy rain that Dante described in hell.
She couldn’t be his because he had this bloody castle to support. And that meant he had to take his pretty arse downstairs and meet Tatiana, the woman gilded in Russian rubles.
He needed to put on a smile and charm her at dinner. Dance with her once, and then again. And tomorrow, at the ball, he should open the dance with her on his arm.
They were to be married within the month following the betrothal ball . . . if all went well. Of course it would go well.
There was no problem with his breeches anymore. He glanced down and smoothed a wrinkle in his cutaway, then walked down the steps.
But he still had this night, this last night.
He would go to dinner for a few courses, and then he would make some excuse to come back up, back to Kate.
A small smile curled his lips.
He had plans.
The moment Wick caught sight of him coming down the stairs he pulled the door to the drawing room shut behind him. “Where in the bloody hell have you been? The princess arrived a good hour ago and you should have been here to greet her,” he said in a furious undertone. “Her uncle was visibly displeased.”
“I’m sorry,” Gabriel said.
“Prince Dimitri doesn’t seem to be a hothead, but it was a clear affront when you didn’t appear, you lugheaded idiot.”
“I will apologize.”
Wick narrowed his eyes at him. “Aren’t you going to ask what your future wife looks like?”
Gabriel considered that, and shook his head.
Wick said something under his breath, and then: “Prince Dimitri and his niece both speak fluent English, by the way. You will be joined by the Princess Sophonisba. Princess Maria-Therese will stay in her rooms this evening.”
“Bloody hell, Aunt Sophonisba is joining us?” Gabriel said with dismay.
“She’s painted her eyes so heavily that she won’t be able to see her dinner,” Wick said. “She’s in there swilling brandy.” Then he lowered his voice. “Just what have you done with Kate?”
“She’s in my chamber, reading. Only reading.”
“I never imagined you’d do something like this,” Wick said, his voice tight with rage. “If you weren’t my brother, I’d leave this house.”
“I’m not doing anything,” Gabriel said between clenched teeth. “For Christ’s sake, Wick, do you think I’d take her virginity? Do you think I’m that sort of man?”
“Keep your voice down. Anyone might descend that stair,” he snapped. “If not, what the hell is she doing in your chamber?”
Gabriel raised his right hand rather blindly and pulled on a glove. “She’s reading. I told you. Just reading.”
Wick stared at him. “Damn it.”
“I did it,” Gabriel said, conversationally. “I met the woman, the only woman for me. I met her, and now . . . I’m going to meet my wife.”
Wick made a sudden movement. “No.”
“That’s the way life is, Wick,” Gabriel said, pulling on his other glove. “It’s not always fair. You should be the first to know that. In case you’re wondering, Kate understands why I must marry Tatiana. She just spent seven years working like an indentured servant for her stepmother, as far as I can see, because she could not countenance leaving the servants and tenants on her father’s estate to her stepmother’s mercies.”
“Then marry her. Bring her servants here and we’ll add them to the crew.”
“We can scarcely feed the lion,” Gabriel said, straightening his rapier. “Don’t treat me like a lovelorn maiden, Wick. I need to marry a woman with bags of money, and that’s what I’m planning to do.”
“We can manage,” Wick said. “Don’t go through with it.”
“How would I support all of them? Who would buy Sophonisba’s brandy, the lion’s beef, the candles, the coal we need to get through the winter?”
“The tenant farms—” Wick began.
Gabriel shook his head. “I’ve spent hours going over the books. In time, the farms will be profitable. But they’ve been neglected. The cottages leak, the steeple in the village church apparently collapsed last year. For all I know, the children are hungry. Not only that, but if I break the engagement, then I’d have to pay a forfeit. I need three dowries, not just one.”
Wick’s comment was short but heartfelt.
“I’ll forget about Kate in time.” He looked Wick straight in the eyes as he said it.
He would never forget her.
Wick knew it too. “I’ve never said how much I appreciate the honor of being your brother,” he said now.
Gabriel quirked a smile. “The feeling is mutual.”
He had barely walked into the drawing room when the doors behind him opened again and Wick’s voice boomed out. “Her Royal Highness, the Princess Tatiana. His Royal Highness, the Prince Dimitri.”
Gabriel squared his shoulders and turned to face his future.
Tatiana was poised in the doorway. She wore an exquisite gown of cream silk, embroidered all over with sprigs of flowers. Her eyes were large and dewy; her lips were a perfect rose pink. She was like a sweet drink of strawberries and cream, her skin a perfect milk, her dark curls satiny.
Gabriel advanced and gave his best court bow. She curtsied with all the grace of a member of the French court. He kissed her hand and she smiled at him, a bit shyly but very sweetly.
If the clouds had opened up and a booming voice had said, This is your bride , he wouldn’t have been surprised.
Tatiana was eminently beddable. Demure though she was, her low décolletage displayed her status as a desirable woman. She had no need for “bosom friends.” She was everything Kate was not: beddable, biddable, and rich.
He had vaguely expected to hate her, and he couldn’t even do that. It took only a quick glance to see that she was very nice. She would never shout at him like a little shrew; it wasn’t in her.
Her uncle Dimitri was smiling broadly and rocking back and forth on his heels. “I’ve been to this castle,” he announced, in a thick accent. “I visited as a lad, when Lord Fitzclarence had the castle. Told my brother that the castle was worth having to come to England.”
The damned castle, Gabriel thought, even as he bowed again and smiled.
“Expected I’d see you this afternoon,” Dimitri said, giving Gabriel a shrewd glance.
“I apologize,” Gabriel said. “I wasn’t aware of your arrival.”
“This little girl is the apple of her father’s eye,” Dimitri announced.
A tiny sound escaped Tatiana’s lips; she was pink with embarrassment.
Gabriel bowed again and gave her a reassuring smile.
“I have to say my piece, chicken,” Dimitri said. “We’re from the Kingdom of Kuban, Your Highness. Don’t suppose you’ve heard much of it.”
“I have not,” Gabriel said, “but—”
Dimitri interrupted him. “My brother helped settle Cossacks next to the Sea of Azov. So we haven’t been princeling about for generations.”
Gabriel nodded respectfully. Over his shoulder, Wick was motioning that he should begin the procession to the dining room.
“What I’m getting to,” Dimitri said, “is that her father didn’t want her pushed into this marriage. If Tatiana likes you, she stays. If she doesn’t, we’ll be leaving, dowry and all, and none of this talk of broken betrothals.” His smile showed his teeth, and all of a sudden Gabriel saw, for just a flash, a Cossack warrior behind the man in blue velvet.
He bowed yet again. Thank God, at that moment Wick touched him on the shoulder, so he turned to Tatiana and offered his arm. “Your Highness, may I accompany you to the dining room?”
She smiled at him, and he noticed that though she was shy, she wasn’t paralyzed by it. Someday she would be a composed and doubtless articulate woman. A perfect princess, in short.
Prince Dimitri fell in behind, with Gabriel’s aunt, Princess Sophonisba, on his arm, and they led the way to the dining room, followed by a great train of jewels, velvets, and silks. The women were exquisite, like delectable pillowy sweets. The men were groomed and polished, like the sleek aristocrats they were.
The only person he wanted to see, the only person he wanted to eat with, was upstairs, wearing a simple gown, a pink wig, and a pair of wax breasts.
Prince Dimitri was quickly swept into an argument with Lady Dagobert about whether the Portuguese court should remain in Rio de Janeiro or eventually return to Portugal, which left Gabriel to make conversation with Tatiana.
Except that his aunt Sophonisba was too old to care about rules dictating who spoke to whom, and so she barked a whole series of questions across the table at Tatiana. Sophonisba was a bad-tempered termagant, by anyone’s measure. His brother Augustus loathed her, and had thrown her onto the boat with the same satisfaction with which he discarded the lion.
“Youngest of four, are you?” Sophonisba said, as the first course was being cleared away. She paused and reached under her wig to scratch her scalp. “There were eight of us. Nursery was a madhouse.”
Tatiana smiled and murmured something. She was obviously kindhearted, and if a little taken aback by his aunt’s abrasive manners, wasn’t letting it affect her courtesy.
“You’re a pretty little thing,” Sophonisba said, picking up a chicken leg and waving it as if she’d never heard of a fork. “What are you looking at?” she snapped at Gabriel. “If it’s good enough for Queen Margherita, it’s good enough for me.”
Tatiana was giggling.
“ La Regina Margherita mangia il pollo con le dita ,” Sophonisba told her. “Can you translate that, girl?”
“I’m not very good with Italian,” Tatiana said, “but I think that Queen Margherita eats chicken with her fingers?”
“Good for you,” Sophonisba said. “How many languages do you speak?”
“My brother and I sent our children to be educated in Switzerland,” Prince Dimitri said, catching the question. “Tatiana’s one of the smartest in our brood; up to five languages, aren’t you, dumpling?”
“Uncle Dimitri!” Tatiana cried.
“Not supposed to call her dumpling anymore,” the prince said, grinning so widely that Gabriel could see every missing tooth. “Though she used to be the most adorable dumpling baby I’d ever seen. We love dumplings in Russia; they’re more precious than rubles.”
Tatiana rolled her eyes.
“I never married, you know,” Sophonisba barked.
She poked Gabriel and he jumped. His mind had drifted to Kate once again. “This fellow’s rascally father, my brother, never accepted an offer for my hand. I could have had anyone!” She scowled at the table, as if daring someone to disagree.
The truth was that Sophonisba had been betrothed to a sprig of a princeling in Germany, but after she had arrived at his court and he had spent a day or two with her, he fled. She’d been sent home in great disgrace, and the Grand Duke never again bothered to try to fix a marriage for her.
“Her Highness,” Gabriel told Tatiana, “was a famed beauty.”
“I still am,” Sophonisba said promptly. “A woman’s beauty isn’t just a matter of youth.”
Tatiana nodded obediently. “My grandmother always said that the greatest beauties in her day were so covered with powder and patches that one couldn’t tell if there was a woman or a horse underneath.”
There was a moment of silence. Sophonisba had four or five patches stuck onto her powdered face; one was coming undone and hanging from her cheekbone.
Tatiana’s mouth fell open and she turned pink as an autumn sunset. “Not that I meant to indicate anything of the sort about you , Your Highness,” she gasped.
“Wasn’t around when your grandmother was young,” Sophonisba said with patent dishonesty, since she had to be seventy-five if she was a day. “I wouldn’t know what she was talking about.”
She turned her head and barked down the table at Dimitri. “That’s utter nonsense, what you’re sayin’ about the Portuguese. Not a drunk in the bunch of them.”
“I do apologize,” came a quiet voice at Gabriel’s right elbow.
“My aunt took no offense,” he said, smiling down at Tatiana. She was bloody young.
“Sometimes the wrong thing just comes out of my mouth,” she whispered.
“Prince!” his aunt said, interrupting this charming, if tedious, revelation. “Not to put too fine a point on it, my bladder is about to burst.”
Gabriel rose to his feet. “If you will all excuse me,” he told the table, “the princess is experiencing a malady and I shall escort her to her chambers.”
“It isn’t a malady; it’s just old age,” Sophonisba said, waving her stick at Wick. He came immediately, drew back her chair, and helped her to her feet.
“You’re the best of them,” Sophonisba told him, as she always did. She pinched his cheek and then looked triumphantly around the table. “Born on the wrong side of the blanket, but he’s just as much a prince as his brother here.”
Lady Dagobert turned purple with indignation at this breach of decorum, but Prince Dimitri looked as if he was biting back a smile, which was a point in his favor.
As Wick was helping Sophonisba straighten her skirts and get her stick in the right position, Gabriel bent down at Tatiana’s shoulder. “You see,” he said quietly, “nothing you could say would ever embarrass me.”
She looked up, dimples in evidence. She’d make a lovely princess; even close contact with Sophonisba wouldn’t shake her composure. Plus, she knew languages.
She was perfect.
His aunt’s chambers were on the bottom level of the tower. It took them a good twenty-five minutes to reach the door of her room, as she constantly paused to rub her ankle and complain about the flagstones, the damp, and the way he held his arm—too stiff for her liking, she pronounced.
The moment the door closed behind her, he turned about and bolted up the stone steps.
He’d been gone for almost two hours. At this rate, Kate had had more than enough time to absorb each picture in Aretino’s book.